58 thoughts on “Sunday Serendipity”

The weekend that starts the emergence of American political senses is finally here. Sitting on a boat, occasionally heeling over (rocking over is more like it) as a wave of wind goes by, is quite relaxing. My boat is in a nice hurricane hole which makes life here better than for those on slips facing the Bay.

So, is Clinton’s disappearing act working? In a way it is. The constant drip of “Benghazi” email news seems to be affecting her poll results. But, it also lets the bloater have the media in a way only he can use it. Her schedule does have her in public once or twice this holiday, but many of us would like to see her out and around more often.

Thank you. A beautiful selection as always. With hours ahead of me just watching the body count mount in the English countryside, my brain refuses to be cluttered with only a minimal amount of politics unless the great Orange does something particularly egregious.

daily mail:
Carnage in Calais: Horrific crash as jungle migrant gangs target tourists in cars in terrifying new AMBUSH technique that left our journalists covered in blood after narrowly escaping death

Ruthless gangs deliberately causing crashes on the roads to the French port by hurling large objects at carsHome Secretary Amber Rudd has spoken out after a team of journalists narrowly escaped death last weekReporter Ben Ellery and photographers Steve Burton and John McLellan were all injuredThey had been investigating a shocking explosion of violence at the squalid migrant camp

As a New York State resident, I remember when gubernatorial debates included pretty much everyone, including the hooker/madam & the Rent Is Too Damn High nut candidates. Have a pulse? Get a spot. I support anyone’s choice to run & appreciate the effort, but there comes a time when folks have to realize victory ain’t gonna happen. At this point the also-rans should step aside or be winnowed out. At least Johnson has an endorsement by a newspaper; Stein remains a quadrennial Nosferatu opportunist whose poll numbers are eclipsed by the Yule Log & supporters are working simply to get her on the ballots – 64 days before the election.

When delegates, visitors and media came streaming through her studio last month, she told them she would sell her Trump to the highest bidder by the end of the week, with all the proceeds going to the Cleveland’s Center for Arts-Inspired Learning, which uses the arts to teach children problem-solving and creative thinking skills.

In the end, with the highest bid at $1,100, she decided to hold out a bit longer. [….]

Buffie has since created a dryer lint bust of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton to keep The Donald company in her store, and is asking for donations from anybody who wants to come take pictures with them. Her highest bid for Clinton is $500, although she hasn’t been around as long. [….]

Trump’s head was built around a gallon milk jug, Clinton’s around a plastic bottle of cranberry juice. His shoulders were shaped around a frame of chicken wire; hers around two tissue boxes. Buffie then wrapped painter’s tape around their necks to attach the heads to their shoulders, before covering each bust in layers of dryer lint.

Not looking good for Jill and Gary on debate stage — Debate commission is using an average of these polls to determine if candidates meet the 15% threshold: ABC-Washington Post; CBS-New York Times; CNN-Opinion Research Corporation; Fox News; and NBC-Wall Street Journal.

Right now that polling average is 8.8 for Johnson and 3.6 for Stein.

As far as when it’s decided the Commission has only said “mid-September” for the first debate, Sept. 26. Not much time for the indies to bump up those numbers.

As an early advocate of “run out the clock” (still think she should snub debates), inevitably supporters will get nervous, moan and groan as polls tighten. I say stay the course, maybe just hop up onto the international space station and watch the rest of the show from there. However, maybe she has taken the disappearing act too far, sure they’ll ramp up public events after Labor Day.

RADDATZ; OK, let’s talk about relationships with the press and you talk about Donald Trump. Secretary Clinton has not held a press conference in 274 days. You argue that she’s talked to press on the campaign trail, but our campaign reporters and others say she doesn’t really answer that many questions. Is this going to change?

KAINE: Martha, she’s had hundreds interviews in the last year. And I got to push back on the notion that she hasn’t done a press conference. She gave a speech to the National Association of Black Journalists within the last month where there were also journalists, Hispanic journalists, there. And she did a press conference there. And members of mainstream media outlets, television networks, asked her questions during that press conference.

We’re about to switch into a phase of the campaign where we will be on planes and the press will be on the planes with us, which is something that Donald Trump does not allow. We are not banning press outlets from covering public events.

And so, look, all the time as Hillary is out on the trail, she’s talking to the press, hundreds of interviews. I’m doing the same. The Labor Day to Election Day stretch, it’s going to ramp up even more.

But we’re not a campaign that is acting like Putin and other dictators and banning press outlets from even attending public events. That’s not American but that’s what Donald Trump is doing.

RADDATZ; So we can expect a press conference, yes or no?

KAINE: There’s been one in the last month and you’re going to see Hillary very, very accessible to the press as I will be between now and November 8.

SJ… no we don’t do s’mores. In fact, I’ve never had one… gotta put that on my to-do list.

I haven’t paid attention to the election much for the past couple of weeks… actually I should make that the entire month of August… I get the gist of what’s happening by reading these comments…. seems like the same old shit everyday.

I think that Clinton may be waiting for Trump to pull out his special revolver and fire a few more shots before jumping back into the game.

Trump has been doing this risky ‘hire wire’ act as of late – trying to appeal to the moderate and independent voters by appearing to make nice with black and Hispanic voters. You know, the “I have many black friends”, I love taco’s; and therefore I can’t be a bigot. There’s a ton of people who, after the constant barrage against Hillary from the right wing media, are waiting for any reason to vote for Trump. The longer he can stay in his box, read speeches (that he doesn’t edit) the higher the chance he can gain support – a true feat for someone so reckless. Alas – Trump just can’t control himself (an admirable trait for a potential US President (not)). I know the American electorate can be stupid – I guess we’ll find out just how stupid they are.

I’m also with Craig about the debates. In his new book, James Carville says of Trump; “arguing with Trump is like trying to argue with a 5-year old”. That about says it all.

And while I’m not a big fan of some of the Libertarian positions (the economic and educational ones), Johnson/Weld aren’t going to get onto the debate stage. That’s a darned shame – but 15% isn’t going to happen unless Clinton or Trump suddenly self-implode.

It’s time for the media in this country to admit what the rest of us have known for more than a year: They are addicted to Donald Trump.
Not a day goes by that the orange face of the Republican presidential nominee isn’t featured at the top of the webpage of every news service at least once during the day. He leads nearly every cable news show. It doesn’t matter if what he says makes sense (it doesn’t). It doesn’t matter if he’s telling the truth (he’s not). It doesn’t matter who he’s insulting (just about everyone). All that matters is that when Trump opens his mouth, the media jump, focus the cameras, and aim the microphones.

Look at the examples from this week. Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton delivered a substantive plan about mental health, with plenty of details. She gave a foreign policy speech to the American Legion and talked about American exceptionalism. Yet all the media could do was talk about Trump’s will-he-or-won’t-he fuzzy and flip-flopping approach to immigration.
The media veered from “he appeared presidential” alongside Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto on the whirlwind trip south of the border to “he’s taking a hard line again” when Trump repeated every immigration threat he’s made for 16 months.

Great article Tony. I remember back in the late 80’s when Arizonans impeached a stooge named Evan Mecham. The media coverage got so bad that some radio stations began advertising “Mecham Free Days” of programming. If some on cable did that with Trump, I just might tune in.

Joining a long list of concerned media voices, The New York Times’ editorial page this week linked up with theBeltway chorus to express alarm over the Clinton Foundation and the “question” it presents for Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
Surveying the well-trampled ground of supposed conflicts of interest and insinuations that Clinton sold State Department access to donors, the Times announced a pressing “need for major changes at the foundation now, before the November election.”

As part of its declaration, the newspaper dutifully noted, “‘Pay-to-play’ charges by Donald Trump have not been proved.” But the Times, like so many other lecturing voices, was quite clear in claiming that the Clintons have to address concerns about optics even if that means shutting down their landmark global charity. That’s how important it now is for the do-good foundation to be spotless and pure: Optics trump humanitarianism.

Or, there’s no proof anybody did anything wrong, therefore drastic actions must be taken to fix the problem.
The meandering foundation story has become a case study for the Beltway media’s double standard: holding Clinton to a higher mark that’s based on optics, not on facts. Unable to prove misconduct or anything close to it (just ask the AP), the press relies on the comfy confines of “optics” and the “appearance” of conflict to allow them to attack Clinton and the foundation.

For Clinton, it’s a can’t-win proposition. If the press says the story looks bad, even if there’s nothing to suggest it actually is bad, she gets tagged with an optics problem. And because journalists are the only ones handing out the grades, they get to decide how bad it looks.

But the journalism malpractice doesn’t end there. It extends to the fact that the press doesn’t apply the same visual test to Republican nominee Donald Trump, whose far-flung business dealings would represent an actual, even historic, conflict of interest were he to be elected president.

This morning’s on-line WaPo has a feature on Mother Teresa’s canonization. Hillary is in good company:

“Teresa’s most famous critic, Christopher Hitchens, has accused her of taking donations from dictators — charges church authorities deny. Francis chose to emphasize her other dealings with the powerful.”

sjwny yes, from east to west, south to north, have seen it in publix and Kroger and safeway and Walmart and more stores in variety of flavors and calorie counts. no way is it a substitute for big dollops of old-fashion whipped cream which is freshly home made with heavy whipping cream, sugar and vanilla.

Bernie’s not speaking to us anymore. Once he stepped down with his lukewarm endorsement of Clinton, we all went looking for someone else to trust. If he had any mojo left, Debbie Whats-her-name Schmutz would’ve been toast. Along with Elizabeth Warren, he has the stench of Clintons on him and that doesn’t wash off.

Stein & Johnson should hold a debate on a social media platform & hope the MSM reports on it. (We can’t expect PBS to do their jobs anymore, what with editing Stein’s remarks about Hillary on TPP.)

SJ – How can they possibly win if people don’t even know they’re running. I hear people saying they don’t like Clinton or Trump; they’re surprised when I mention Stein & Johnson.

Either we have no free press, or, we just have an incompetent press. If questioned, would they claim ignorance like Hillary? The classified emails (that’s what the “c” stands for, which is horrifying if Hillary didn’t know that, but if course, she knew), Clinton Foundation, Huma Amedin, Cheryl Mills, Bleachbit, mobile devices smashed with a hammer sounds like enough threads for any real journalists out there to start pulling to reveal the devil running as a Democrat.

Cool whip – whatever it is. It is a delightful and deliciuos ersatz whipped cream like substance. At least that’s how I see it through the lens of a kid and adult. No southern Sunday brunch or lunch would be complete without it.

The national polls are not weighted by the electoral college which is why they don’t mean much

Trumps gains are in red states – so to some extent his trying to appeal to wayward Republicans is working but it has only helped in states where he shouldn’t need help in the first place

Bernie lost Wasserman’s Schultz’s congressional district by a big margin and even though Bernie’s new political action group abandoned the challenger before that happened he did raise $4 million dollars. No matter what Bernie did this guy was not going to beat Debbie! Her district likes her.

Next the anti Hillary crowd will be hearing and seeing space Aliens or their sky God like M. Bachman does….. Seems a better bet for them.. Umm, oh to be disillusioned all the time, must be a miserable existence.. Thankfully I have more faith in Hillary and Democrats to do the right thing overall.. It is about the bigger picture.. Supreme Court i mean…????

Hello – miss you when you’re not around. (This holds for everyone here. I get worried when I don’t see your posts. Not so much missing your opinions as much as concerned about you.)

Jill Stein has been around a long time. She is a known quantity within the Press. Honestly if she & her Party wanted to be more visible & newsworthy they would take the olde timey path of putting feet on the ground & getting out the message, one-on-one. Build a foundation voters see as competent & inclusive. Field Candidates for local races, state races. Going after the Presidency every 4 years won’t strengthen the Party; makes it look more as a side show with precious little heavy lifting involved.

*********

Came across this paragraph from the May 10th issue of Rolling Stone. The story is about Wavy Gravy; the author is David Browne.

Browne: Are you reviving Nobody [for President] this year?

Wavy Gravy: No. This time, I’m supporting anything but Trump. And people should make their vote count. I suspect that if we do, and if people realize the horror of that possibility, that people that never voted before will rise in mass numbers and blow him out of the water. And I suspect we’ll have a woman president.

What Bernie Movement should have learned (but probably didn’t) from the disastrous attempt to unseat Wasserman- Schultz is that what sells in Vermont is a bust in Florida and other places. Also most college Profs make terrible candidates.

….moderators selected by the Commission on Presidential Debates — a notable roster that includes:

The first African American moderator (Holt) since Carole Simpson in 1992 (Gwen Ifill moderated vice-presidential debates in 2004 and 2008, and Bernard Shaw moderated the VP debate in 2000)The first openly gay moderator (Cooper)And the first moderator from Fox News (Wallace)

Vice-presidential debate moderator Elaine Quijano also represents a couple of milestones. She is the first Asian American moderator of a general-election debate and the first to work primarily for a digital network (CBSN).

As both Pat and I have tried to explain to you multiple times that little “c” does not mean Classified. Obviously you want to believe the lie more than you want to believe at least two people who spent years working with that type of material.

Oh and PatD – We have something else in common. We are whipped cream snobs. Heavy cream whipped at home thank you anything else is an ersatz imitation of a glorious concoction. 🙂

Cool whip dishes were accompanied by whipped cream dishes at all the feeds I went to. Cool whip held up to heat better than whipped cream – and was the better option for lazy college boys. It might not be mom’s cooking, but that wasn’t an option. Anything that had mini marshmallows didn’t demand whipped cream.

I love how the bots threw Bernie out like last week’s trash. I find the disloyalty offensive.

Patd, moon pies fer shure. RC Cola – much better than pepsi, but I grew up watching the Bear Bryant Show, which was sponsored by Coca-Cola and Golden Flake potato chips. I preferred Coke to RC, but RC Slice was very good when you could find it.

Almost right. Most commonly it is something that is not confidential in its own right but may be either extracted from a confidential document or indicate that the action suggested (i.e. a phone call) should be handled in a confidential manner. Either way, it is not something that needs to be handled in the same way that other classified documents whether confidential, secret, top secret, talk about this & die are treated. I wrote about it and Patd expanded on it. After all the the noise Comey admitted that it wasn’t actually confidential which is what all the “careless” business was about.

Heres what I read. It was in Politifact. Even though they designated claims claims that she never sent or received any classified emails as false, read the editor’s note at the bottom of the article. There were 2 with the “(c)” notation. Comey thought there were 3

Again. The (c) notation is a “heads up” but does not require special handling. Of the three, one was withdrawn as even hinting at being classified and the other two were classified after the fact. This issue is the one that makes people who have handled corrected marked classified materials absolutely up the wall crazy. Over classification is an absolute disease between governmental departments. Here is the questioning of Comey that never gets mentioned:

Rep. Matt Cartwright, also a Democrat, asked Comey if the emails were properly classified, and Comey said they were not. (Executive Order 13526 spells out how documents should be properly classified, including a header on the document clearly identifying the email as classified as “confidential,” “secret” or “top secret.”)

Those little “c” indicators are “portion markings”. As I have repeatedly tried to explain, if there is no HEADER & STAMP, the document does not need special handling.

Cartwright asked if Clinton could have missed the improper markings. Comey said that that was possible.

Cartwright, July 7: So, if Secretary Clinton really were an expert at what’s classified and what’s not classified and we’re following the manual, the absence of a header would tell her immediately that those three documents were not classified. Am I correct in that?
Comey: That would be a reasonable inference.

Sign up to volunteer for Donald Trump’s campaign, and you might be giving up more than you bargained for.
Earlier this week, reporters began poring over the 2,271-word nondisclosure agreement that Trump’s campaign requires its volunteers sign. The forms are extraordinarily broad, virtually prohibiting any volunteers from criticizing Trump or his family for the rest of their lifetimes, according to Rachel Sklar, a lawyer and CNN contributor.
On Twitter, Sklar noted that the forms also bar volunteers from criticizing Trump’s brands, disclosing anything personal about Trump (including his taxes), or from even employing people who work for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. (That last one’s illegal, Sklar says.)

Fair enough. Let’s say Clinton wins. What’s going to be the media narrative of the first woman president?

Rebecca Traister
It will be credited to Donald Trump. And no one will consider that we got Donald Trump because she was Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump wouldn’t have arisen if it was in competition with John Kerry. Donald Trump was the candidate Hillary Clinton made come into life because he is built on resentments to progress made by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

No one will consider that we got Donald Trump because she was Hillary Clinton
No one ever says she is a very strong candidate, she is beating this guy that no Republican can beat, that she has had 30 years of people hating her so powerfully and she remains so popular in this country.
You already saw with Bernie: If you have read the press, Bernie could have beaten her if he had only gone after her harder. He was such a mensch. It was Bernie who won the primary for Hillary, according to popular narratives. It will be Trump who won the presidency for Hillary because he was such a spectacularly crappy candidate. It will be Bill Clinton, if she wins some larger percentage of the white voters. They are going to say all these different factors — dudes — made it possible for her to win.

Donald Trump has blasted Hillary Clinton for accepting money from Saudi Arabia through her foundation, but a Daily News investigation reveals he has padded his bank account with cash from the same country.
Trump sold the 45th floor of Trump World Tower to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia for $4.5 million in June 2001, according to a city Finance Department spokeswoman. In 2008, the apartments became part of the Saudi Mission to the United Nations, records show.

So obviously not a debate that I’m going to pay a lot of attention to:

Chris Wallace says it won’t be his job to separate truth from fiction in his historic role as moderator of the final debate before the November election.
Wallace, who earlier this month became the first journalist from Fox News to be chosen to moderate a presidential debate , spoke to the network’s Howard Kurtz about the difficulties of the job and his aim to “ask smart questions” and “engage the two [candidates] in conversation.”
But when Kurtz asked how Wallace planned to negotiate a campaign fraught withfalsehoods and unfounded accusations, Wallace’s answer was less than comforting.
“That’s not my job,” Wallace, who hosts Fox News Sunday, said. “I do not believe that it’s my job to be a truth squad. It’s up to the other person to catch them on that. I certainly am going to try to maintain some semblance of equal time if one of them is filibustering, I’m going to try to break in respectfully and give the other person a chance to talk.”http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/chris-wallace-presidential-debate_us_57ccc67ce4b0a22de0967652?ybxyb9rh39dqs38fr

speaking of… here’s krugman in ny times: Hillary Clinton Gets Gored
Americans of a certain age who follow politics and policy closely still have vivid memories of the 2000 election — bad memories, and not just because the man who lost the popular vote somehow ended up in office. For the campaign leading up to that end game was nightmarish too.
You see, one candidate, George W. Bush, was dishonest in a way that was unprecedented in U.S. politics. Most notably, he proposed big tax cuts for the rich while insisting, in raw denial of arithmetic, that they were targeted for the middle class. These campaign lies presaged what would happen during his administration — an administration that, let us not forget, took America to war on false pretenses.
Yet throughout the campaign most media coverage gave the impression that Mr. Bush was a bluff, straightforward guy, while portraying Al Gore — whose policy proposals added up, and whose critiques of the Bush plan were completely accurate — as slippery and dishonest. Mr. Gore’s mendacity was supposedly demonstrated by trivial anecdotes, none significant, some of them simply false. No, he never claimed to have invented the internet. But the image stuck.
And right now I and many others have the sick, sinking feeling that it’s happening again.

more from paul Krugman linked above:Meanwhile, we have the presumption that anything Hillary Clinton does must be corrupt, most spectacularly illustrated by the increasingly bizarre coverage of the Clinton Foundation.Step back for a moment, and think about what that foundation is about. When Bill Clinton left office, he was a popular, globally respected figure. What should he have done with that reputation? Raising large sums for a charity that saves the lives of poor children sounds like a pretty reasonable, virtuous course of action. And the Clinton Foundation is, by all accounts, a big force for good in the world. For example, Charity Watch, an independent watchdog, gives it an “A” rating — better than the American Red Cross.Now, any operation that raises and spends billions of dollars creates the potential for conflicts of interest. You could imagine the Clintons using the foundation as a slush fund to reward their friends, or, alternatively, Mrs. Clinton using her positions in public office to reward donors. So it was right and appropriate to investigate the foundation’s operations to see if there were any improper quid pro quos. As reporters like to say, the sheer size of the foundation “raises questions.”But nobody seems willing to accept the answers to those questions, which are, very clearly, “no.”

and in conclusion, he writes:So I would urge journalists to ask whether they are reporting facts or simply engaging in innuendo, and urge the public to read with a critical eye. If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.And here’s a pro tip: the best ways to judge a candidate’s character are to look at what he or she has actually done, and what policies he or she is proposing. Mr. Trump’s record of bilking students, stiffing contractors and more is a good indicator of how he’d act as president; Mrs. Clinton’s speaking style and body language aren’t. George W. Bush’s policy lies gave me a much better handle on who he was than all the up-close-and-personal reporting of 2000, and the contrast between Mr. Trump’s policy incoherence and Mrs. Clinton’s carefulness speaks volumes today.In other words, focus on the facts. America and the world can’t afford another election tipped by innuendo.

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